Katharine Rogers

Katharine Rogers, a Professor Emerita of English from Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, now lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland. She has published many articles and books on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and women's studies. Her first book, written when she was forced onto compulsory pregnancy leave, was The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (University of Washington Press, 1966). There she analyzed the hostility to women that has run through major authors in the western tradition from its roots in the Bible and classical literature up to the present -- a hostility that was at that time denied by the critical establishment. Two succeeding books, Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England (University of Illinois Press, 1982) and Frances Burney: The World of “Female Difficulties” (Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1990), discuss early women writers.

Since retirement, she has pursued her interests in animals and in the Oz books of L. Frank Baum. Her L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz (St. Martin’s Press, 2002) includes the feminism in his life and works; and her books on cats and dogs – The Cat and the Human Imagination (University of Michigan Press, 1998), First Friend: A History of Dogs and Humans (St. Martin’s, 2005), and Cat (Reaktion, 2006) – include the influence of gender stereotypes on our attitude toward these animals.